Transforming Business: Big Data, Mobility, and Globalization

The Collaboration Craze

67% of employees say they feel powerless to control email and meeting overload.¹

When Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University, endeavored to find the recipe to successful teams, he turned his attention to Broadway musicals. According to Uzzi, pulling off these theatrical productions requires the epitome of teamwork: “Nobody creates a Broadway musical by themselves. The production requires too many different kinds of talent.” Indeed, a musical is delivered through a diverse cast and crew—including the performers, choreographers, composers, musicians, producers, stagehands, and director, to name but a few. Having dedicated his career to discovering the ideal composition of a team, Uzzi wondered if groups consisting of those with preexisting relationships perform better than those composed largely of strangers. To answer the question, he studied the teams behind 474 musicals produced between 1945 and 1989 and charted the degree of extant relationships among collaborators with the success of the show. He devised a formula to measure the relative density of previous relationships on a team, a factor he called Q. His hypothesis was that those teams with a history of working together would yield more winning ventures. Indeed, his data proved Q to ...